The Disease of Distance
Aaron Levie calls it AI psychosis. It's really a measurement error you catch by standing too far from the work.
The people most certain that AI is about to replace everyone tend to be the ones who’ve never watched it fail at something they cared about. That isn’t a coincidence. It’s the mechanism.
Aaron Levie (Box) has a name for the state they’re in. He calls it AI psychosis, and he thinks executives are the most exposed to it, for a reason that has nothing to do with intelligence or temperament. They catch it because of where they sit. Levie sells AI software to 68% of the Fortune 500 and uses it all day, so he’s watched the onset up close, including in the mirror. You prototype a product over a weekend. You ask for market research and get back in ninety seconds what used to take an analyst a week. The floor tilts. For a few minutes, sometimes a few weeks, you live inside one thought: this does everything, so what are the rest of us for.
Levie’s framing is the useful part. He said CEOs are “sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI.” The claim isn’t that executives are gullible. It’s that distance itself is the disease. The further you stand from the actual work, the more complete the automation looks, because everything you can see from up there is the part AI does well, and none of what you can’t see is the part it botches.
What the demo hides
Think about what a demo actually is. A demo is the eighty percent that comes easy, staged so the twenty percent that’s brutal never appears. An executive’s whole day is built out of demos: the polished deck, the thing someone already de-risked before it reached the calendar. So when AI hands an executive a flawless-looking first pass, it slots into a worldview already made of first passes. The dread feels like clear sight, when it’s the opposite. It’s the view from the plane, where the city has no traffic and every roof is intact.
Come down to the ground and the opposite is true. The last mile is the whole job. Levie describes the ordinary texture of it: the agent wrote bugs, and it pulled from the wrong spreadsheet, so if you hadn’t read the report yourself you’d have walked into a meeting and argued for exactly the wrong thing with total confidence. The output looked finished and wasn’t. Engineers can run a test and catch this; a contract or a hiring call can’t be unit-tested, so a human has to sit there and verify by hand. None of that friction is visible from altitude. All of it is the work.
The cure is contact
Which is why the cure isn’t reassurance. You can’t talk someone out of AI psychosis with a calming essay about how the robots aren’t ready. The only thing that resolves it is contact. Levie’s prescription is almost rude in its simplicity: use the technology so much that the awe wears off. Run it past the demo, into the part where you have to fix what it gave you, and the spell breaks on its own. It took him a couple of weeks. On the far side isn’t disappointment; it’s a working relationship, where you know what the tool is great at and where you still have to stand over it.
There’s a subtler failure on the same axis, and it’s the one to fear. The danger isn’t the executive who refuses to touch AI; that person is merely behind, and the market will educate them soon enough. The danger is the one who tries it once, gets dazzled, and stops looking. They saw the demo, mistook it for the territory, and built a strategy on the eighty percent while the twenty percent waited to surface in production. The convert got close enough for one look, then backed off before the lesson landed. That decision is cut from distance too, and it falls apart on contact with the work.
Where the value moved
The point Levie keeps circling is where value concentrates now. Not in generation; generation has gotten cheap and will get cheaper. It concentrates in the last mile, in the judgment that catches the wrong spreadsheet and the taste to know a plausible draft is still wrong. That’s not a sentimental claim about the human spirit. It’s structural. The work left after the easy eighty percent gets automated is the work that was always hardest, and it decides whether any of the rest was worth doing.
So if you feel the dread, or the high, treat it as a symptom of where you’re standing rather than a forecast about the world. Then close the distance on purpose. Pick one task you genuinely own, something you’ll have to defend to a real person on a real date, and do the whole thing with AI: not the demo version, the shipped version. Push it until it breaks, fix what broke, and count how many times you had to step in. That number is your real read on the technology, and it’s one no demo will ever show you. Levie got his in a couple of weeks. You can start on yours this week.
This essay was inspired by Aaron Levie, Box CEO: Advice for CIOs on AI Agents - YouTube